In FSR there have been 2 races that started wet but the rain stopped pretty quickly (Silverstone - ACE and Belgium - WC). Only the driving line gets dry - the rest of the track has no evaporation at all unless you drive on that part of it. The RR progression is set to 1x. Will this be changed at all? Or is there a way to speed up evaporation off the driving line? An hour with no evaporation offline is a bit too much if you ask me.
I'll be the pedant: there is evaporation. But it is very slow. How fast should the evaporation be? Open question.
Closer to real life, preferably. Surely in an hour's time there should be some drying off of the racing line. You can appreciate that surely the current rate is way too slow.
But what is "real life"? Silverstone for example, if it rains the track can stay wet for ages after it stops raining, this much I know from living in England and dealing with our splendid weather! Conversely on another day it could dry much quicker depending on many other factors (wind, humidity, cloud cover etc). What speed it dries up at one track should not be identical at another imo, it maybe too slow overall (and therefore maybe needs tweaking) as it currently is, hopefully if wind and humidity ever get added to the sim then that could influence drying times.
I agree it's too slow, but how fast is 'about right' is an interesting question. (how wet is 'fully wet' is another, related, interesting question)
I think the evaporation rate is appropriate, at least in overcast conditions. Maybe the sun should do more to evaporate the water. It's down to a whole host of things that aren't implemented that affect wet weather racing. For one, in real life drivers search for wet patches to cool down their tires so the dry line get's wider. The water does nothing in Rf2 to affect the tire temperature. Absolutely ridiculous when you consider that water takes heat away from objects at least 20 times faster than air. You'll see this clearly if you drive the clio in the wet. The tires easily go above 100 C, which is stupid because any water on the tire would immediately boil off and reduce the tire temp. Another thing is that there is no variation in the water depth because of altitude changes or undulations. The water doesn't move according to the laws of gravity. If the water started to get cleared from a particular line, water near it would begin to move over to that line and then cars would run over that and thus a wider dry line is created over time. Think of turn 1 at Silverstone in F1 this year. Long after the rain stopped, drivers were still having problems with water there because anytime the water got cleared, more would just move over to replace it. I think these things aren't implemented because they would be too taxing on our CPUs and maybe GPUs too. Wet weather racing in rf2 is bit of fun for what it is but I can't understand why a top league would use it. It's totally out of place in a sim that simulates dry weather racing so brilliantly. It's just a gimmick/experiment that ISI did that was included in rf2.
I estimated the evaporation rate in rF2 by loading a wet realroad profile on a dry sunny track, put accelerated time on and followed the road progress with 0 cars on track. Turned out it would take around 6 hours in rF2 on 1x RR rate to get the water evaporated to below 10%, which is surely not appropriate. I remember the race from Spa 2000 which started at full wet conditions, the last laps when Häkkinen passed Schumacher it was completely dry and even the puddles on Kemmel straight had evaporated. So in less than 90 minutes the track went from wet to dry, so surely it cannot take 360 minutes on any track, even on one with poor drainage. IMO leagues must be given better access to control weather variables through the plugin interface or such, since the current development on weather improvements is so slow. If you look at below video from time instant 1h 45m onwards, it just looks plain wrong:
Temperature (ambient and track) humidity, wind and pressure all comes into play IRL - not the case ingame.
Appropriate wasn't the right word there. Maybe I should say, scientifically accurate if you exclude the effects of the sun. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSK8cVy1vss Spa 2000. In this, near the end of the race, if you look at areas that were in permanent shade there hasn't been much evaporation. The area to the right of the screen coming into the bus stop is an example. Access to plugins would make f-all difference. You'd still end up with a totally dry line and then a wetter part that the drivers just wouldn't touch because it's still wetter. The same situation, just less extreme maybe. For the reasons I said above, it's just a gimmick. Leagues shouldn't touch it outside of fun races.
Just to give you an idea, wich factors play an important role for the evaporation rate, I would advice some of you to read this: http://onlinecalc.sdsu.edu/evapotranspiration_using_the_shuttleworth_wallace_method.html My point is, that there is not right or wrong as it is dependended on alot of different factors, some that are not working in the sim right now. Track and ambient temperature, humidity and windspeed would be a good start to atleast get a somewhat realistic approximation. The radiation for the different latitudes and longitutes would be possible aswell, but it would require the calculation of an average value for the whole year, as radiation varies alot througout the year. I hope this helps to give an understanding of how complex evaporation is
Ok you're still not understanding it; on two separate days you can have vastly different water evaporation rates. Try this for yourself, when it's hot & sunny outside go throw a bucket of water on your driveway and time how long it takes for the water to evaporate - do exactly the same on a cloudy cool day and I'll guarantee the times are very different, therefore "...surely it cannot take..." means "yes it could" Spa especially, being F1 fans you all know what the weather can be like there and seeing it for myself I know it can be a right PITA but simple other weather factors (not yet in RF2 I don't think) mean we don't get a reliable evaporation for the actual weather conditions it would seem.
I don't see standing water anywhere in this Spa video during the last laps, I think you are confusing the shadows near bus stop with water. I understand that maybe part of the equations are still missing for evaporation, which would make it behave unrealistic. But then it should be replaced by a temporary rate which is approximately the mean instead of the current 6 hours wet-to-dry value. That's how rF2 has it done in other aspects as well, for example the tire model has plenty of these "TemporaryGripLoss" etc. values that simulate something which is not yet complete, but yet brings an approximately realistic behaviour.
Ooh I love a weather discussion! Even though there are numerous factors affecting evaporation, surely the game could simplify some obvious things to make it more realistic. It doesn't need a huge amount of variables to make it closer to real life. I'd say the things that could 'quickly' be changed are simply the temperature, and sunlight. Which go hand in hand anyway. I don't know how the coding is working for evaporation but I can't imagine it would be that hard to have it increasing with temperature. For example: Silverstone in winter with a 5°C temp - would take 3-4ish hours to dry. Bahrain or Dubai in summer with a 35°C temp. Could be as quick as 30mins, maybe even more. I'm sure this would be fairly easy to achieve, rather than making unnecessary complex calculations on wind speed, humidity etc.
Agree with you, but wind is a very important factor in evaporation, which is not that hard to implement too... Anyway i think weather in rF2 needs an update. Main problem with rain is that track gets full of water like it was a boat, there's no infiltration, which makes it harder to dry...
You could copy this and paste it in 8-10 discussions and be just as relevant Fully agree. Bear in mind I had pm discussions with ISI regarding the across-the-board wet track effects (same for all tyres) and it was a number of months later that a new tyre parameter got added so that, for example, a slick tyre could lose more grip than a treaded tyre when the track was wet (a very very simple aquaplaning simulation). So it can happen, but it does take time.
But generally ISI don't like to do 'canned effects', wind and sun influence are both very dependant on the surroundings, but yeah SOME features would be nice to get - even if not 100% mathematical correct.
This is from the Build 1080 changelog: So, the water evaporation rate has been updated relatively recently (April), and has been purposefully been set to the rate that we now have.
